The Railway King

the long version

Kirby England, a blunt and rugged nineteenth-century Yorkshireman, was born to poverty in the Dales, but climbed with ruthless ambition to become the rich and famous Railway King. He was surprised when a dying Quaker woman asked him to become guardian to her daughter until she came of age. Hester Gurney didn’t have what normally appealed to Kirby in a woman, though she did have a considerable fortune, which could further his grand schemes of building railways across England. But Hester proved full of spirit and contradictions, and in the end surprised herself and Kirby in ways that changed them both forever. A marvelously romantic tale of the building of the railroads in England in the 1830s and 40s.